Section: The American Interest (USA)
Russia Needs Ukraine, Too
Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and its seizure of Crimea threw a spotlight on Gazprom’s stranglehold on Europe’s gas market, and sent many policymakers into a tizzy worrying over how to reduce dependence on Russian supplies. For years Moscow has wielded its enormous oil and gas reserves as a geopolitical lever in Europe, and...
Putin Takes a Small Second Helping of Georgian Territory
According to Tblisi, yesterday Russian troops moved a border in South Ossetia, a chunk of Georgia that Moscow seized control of in a brief 2008 war, including a section of international pipeline. ABC has more: Georgia says the de facto border was pushed nearly a kilometer (a half mile) deeper into its territory, leaving a section of the...
Global Public Opinion on Territorial Aggression Not So Global After All
Pew has released the Spring 2015 Global Attitudes Survey, its latest worldwide poll of what worries whom where. Overall, the survey found that problems seen as global cause the most fretting; climate change took gold and ISIS silver, while economic instability came in third. Further on in Pew’s report, in a section titled “Territorial...
Bad Romance
Looking at the global chessboard, one can’t help but be puzzled. Only yesterday, Russia was dating Europe; today, the Kremlin is trying to persuade the world (and itself?) that it has fallen in love with Beijing. Witness Russia’s hosting last week of the dual summit of the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization—a clear signal...
Can Saakashvili Do It?
Odessans living in the city’s center were shocked awake by the sounds of a bomb exploding at the Angelovyh Café in the early morning hours on a Wednesday morning in early July. The bombing campaign which had reached a near weekly peak this spring had commenced mysteriously at around the time of the second Minsk accords. Terrorists, widely...
Gazprom Gets a Taste of Its Own Medicine
The Russian gas firm Gazprom has been in the news lately because of its stand-off with Ukraine over unpaid bills. Now the shoe’s on the other foot: Turkmenistan is alleging that the company hasn’t yet paid for 2015 gas deliveries. Reuters reports: “Since the beginning of 2015, OAO Gazprom has not paid for its debts to state concern...
Kiev Pushing to Get US Training for its Soldiers
If Ukraine can’t get America to send troops to help it fight Russian-backed rebels, at least can it make its soldiers more like America’s. That, at least, is Kiev’s reasoning as it advocates expanding the U.S. training program for its national guardsmen currently in place outside of Lviv in western Ukraine. The Wall Street...
The Waiting Game
The drama of the U.S. (now P5+1) negotiations with Iran over its nuclear infrastructure has been ongoing now for more than a dozen years, if we date the inception point to 2002, when some dissidents leaked information about Iran’s nuclear weapons work. (They did not tell the U.S. Government much of anything it did not already know, but...
From Russia, with Malice
Russian state media have found a smoking gun showing that Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) is at the head of a secret American cabal that’s colluding with Ukrainian PM Arseny Yatsenyuk to pull the strings on a puppet government in Kiev. And oddly, this Machiavellian mastermind doesn’t know his own title, and he has only a...
Whose Armenia?
As the Electric Yerevan protests in Armenia enter their third week, the fate of the latest “people power” movement remains uncertain. While the numbers have ebbed and flowed, the protestors are still showing signs of vitality and resolve. Their relations with the regime, however, seem increasingly deadlocked, and the protesters are now looking to...
